A series of visits from Bulgarian military and government officials to the small town of Samokov in recent months hints at the increasing importance of what one company here is producing.
The Samel-90 factory, located just south of Bulgaria's capital, Sofia, began operations in the 1960s developing electronics for the Bulgarian military. Now, with an eye on rapid military evolutions on the battlefields of Ukraine, the company is making aerial weapons and anti-drone systems.
"We started developing kamikaze drones two years ago," Veneta Popova, the head of drone production at the plant, told RFE/RL. "We currently produce about 50 per month, but we have the capacity to triple that," she says.
Inside the factory, craft reminiscent of Iranian-designed Geran-2 kamikaze drones sit in various stages of completion.
Samel-90 was privatized after the collapse of the country’s socialist regime in 1989 and Petar Georgiev, a former employee of the plant, now owns it. Georgiev says amid increasing focus in Europe on drone warfare the company has received a surge in interest in its weaponized drones, as well as its anti-drone systems.
But as Brussels touts a planned “drone wall” protecting NATO’s flanks Georgiev told RFE/RL the potential for Samel-90 contributing to the EU's defensive effort are unclear. "There can be a place for us, but everything depends on the Bulgarian government,” Georgiev says.
Samel-90’s range of drone-jamming devices are currently sold to India, Egypt, and “other countries in the east,” priced at a fraction of the cost of western European versions of the same technology.
Georgiev says that for now, western European nations are not purchasing the Bulgarian technology. “Our products are just as good as theirs, but the countries there look after their own manufacturers," he says.
The flying wing drone that the factory produces, called the Samjet, is much smaller than its nearly hang-glider sized Iranian-Russian counterpart and is fitted with a correspondingly smaller warhead. Samjets use an electric motor that is quieter than the dreaded gasoline-powered whine of the Gerans but gives the aerial weapon a relatively short range of around 100 kilometers compared to over 1,000 kilometers for the Gerans.
According to Borislav Lazarov, the production organizer in the drone workshop, building a Samjet takes between three days and a week from start to finish.
China is currently the world leader in drone technology, with its DJI brand responsible for a staggering 70 percent of sales of consumer drones wordwide. Much of the technology in the Chinese company’s drones, such as visual tracking systems, have obvious military applications which analysts say is undoubtedly being utilized in its weaponized drone programs.
For Samel-90's owner Georgiev, the weaponry and anti-drone technology being produced in Samakov is, first and foremost a Bulgarian asset amid an increasingly shaky security situation in Europe.
"We need to take steps and actions ourselves, and by "we" I mean Bulgaria as a country," he says, adding, "I think we have enough technological capabilities of every kind and we should not underestimate ourselves."
